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Copying Albums


When keeping your photos separated in multiple libraries, you sometimes have the need to move a set of photos from one library to another. With iPhoto, the only way to do this is to export the photos from one library and then import them into another. However, in the process of doing this, you lose all the data you've worked to assign to your photos, such as titles, dates, keywords, and ratings. iPhoto Library Manager provides a way to copy photos from one library to another without losing this valuable information.

An album of photos can be copied from one library to another by dragging the album(s) you want to copy from the albums list in the main iPhoto Library Manager window and dropping them onto the library you would like to copy them to. iPhoto Library Manager will first collect the information about those photos from the source library, and then import those photos into the destination library and restore all the photo information as it was before. If you drag more than one album at once, and a photo belongs to more than one of those albums, the photo will only be imported once, but will be added to all the appropriate newly created albums in the destination library.

Due to technical limitations, if you drag a folder of albums from one library to another, the folder and its hierarchy will not be recreated in the destination library, only the albums contained inside the folder. If you copy a smart album, a regular album will be created in the destination with the photos that were in the smart album at the time. Also, when copying RAW photos, you can choose either to copy the original RAW version to the destination library, or the edited JPG version of the photo, but not both.

When copying albums, the photos in those albums will be imported as a series of rolls. In the preferences under the "Photo Copying" tab, you can choose to:

Unregistered users are limited to only copying albums with no more than 20 photos.

See also:

Merging libraries

Importing photos

Registration and support